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If there's any merit to these figures, this is pretty crazy. I'm tempted to side with apple b/c I generally think they're at least less bad than FB and I value

• franczesko 5y ago
  In the meantime Apple is growing it's own advertising business. Apple's privacy claim cannot be trusted (e.g. China).
  • cloutchaser 5y ago
    This is the crucial point I think. Apple claims its on the side of privacy when it suits them. When it doesn't they don't care. In fact as the only big tech company allowed in China, you could argue they have a much worse effect on privacy overall for humanity than any other tech company. It's all bullshit, and marketing. Apple is doing this to grow apple ads. That's it.
    • lucian1900 5y ago
      China has very strong privacy laws, though. In fact, Grindr recently stopped operating there because their business model was made very difficult by the new PIPL law.
      • treeman79 5y ago
        Seems like a sick joke as people have zero privacy from the government in China.
        • endisneigh 5y ago
          source?
          • treeman79 5y ago
            https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/04/sports/olympics/pelosi-protests.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/04/sports/olympics/pelosi-pr...
          • bloqs 5y ago
            • endisneigh 5y ago
              that doesn't mean Chinese people have zero privacy, lol. Would you say USA citizens also have no privacy, as the US government does the same thing? it would be fair to say that Chinese are monitored, yes. not that they have zero privacy. what a ridiculous, unsubstantiated claim.
              • treeman79 5y ago
                Not to dismiss what the US does. But China is on a completely different level. Look at what happened to one of their athletes after she complained about being a assaulted at the last Olympics. US is probably a few decades that level. Hopefully longer.
        • simondotau 5y ago
          One could be reductive and say that the Chinese Government has given themselves a monopoly on privacy invasion. Is that strictly worse than privacy invasion as a capitalist business model? I think the answer to that is highly subjective and highly culturally dependent. Obviously the the ideal would be to have neither.
          • treeman79 5y ago
            Private companies are usually not allowed to make you disappear
    • kergonath 5y ago
      > In fact as the only big tech company allowed in China, you could argue they have a much worse effect on privacy overall for humanity than any other tech company. I would argue that it would be far worse for humanity if they decided that they did not have to follow local laws. Regardless of what you might think of our laws here, I do not want a foreign company feeling entitled to ignore them and impose their American views. They do it far too often as it is already. If you want Apple to provide better privacy, change your laws and make sure they are followed. In the meantime, until Apple is found to have violated local data protection laws, the whole “but China” argument is a red herring.
    • strikelaserclaw 5y ago
      All companies are sociopaths that are only after the dollar. If Apple does something "good", it is basically benefitting them in some way, if it stops doing so they will change. Name me one company which sacrificed profitability for ethics.
  • threatofrain 5y ago
    What is Apple's most visible marketing initiate as of late?
  • marcellus23 5y ago
    What ad business? Don’t they really only show ads in Apple News? How is that comparable to what FB and Google do?
    • JustMarco 5y ago
      App Store ads are growing fast.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      • oefrha 5y ago
        Which part of that require tracking? You search for Facebook, they show you a TikTok ad as the first result (granted, quite annoying more often than not). Same business model as DuckDuckGo.
    • jsnell 5y ago
      Their $5 billion / year ad business in the App Store, News and Stocks. The one where they track you by default in many Apple apps, build a cross-app ad profile based on your behavior, demographic information you are forced to enter to even reate an account, geographic location, and so on. And then they allow ads to be targeted against you using fairly high granularity user segments (minimum 5k users). See https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/apple-advertising/ https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/apple-advertisin... for the details. Want to opt out of this? It's a OS-level setting in an obscure place, rather than what Apple requires from 3p apps. Now, Apple isn't uniquely bad in the level of tracking they do. They're just the same as all of these companies are. The place where they are unique is the incredibly brazen self-dealing, using their control of iOS to boost their own tracking ad business over the competitors.
      • simondotau 5y ago
        > [Apple] build a cross-app ad profile Citation? I'm not saying your wrong, but I haven't heard anyone make this claim before. > rather than what Apple requires from 3p apps For the sake of argument, even if we assume your prior claim is correct, this is still incorrect. Apple does not require third party apps to notify users or provide an opt-out mechanism from tracking user activity across the apps of a singular developer.
  • KoftaBob 5y ago
    There's a separate setting for its own advertising network that asks the user if they want their activity in apps to be used to target ads they see. Just like for the case of 3rd party apps like FB, it can be turned off.
  • soundnote 5y ago
    I've heard that they toyed with the idea of making iCloud end to end encrypted but government agencies convinced them otherwise.
• gnz11 5y ago
  What rules of the game? Apple has no obligation to make Facebook a profitable company. If anything, the lesson here is to not tightly couple core parts of your business model to a third party.
• darrenf 5y ago
  > the fact that a company can do this to another company I don't necessarily believe Apple are being deliberately adversarial here. Perhaps I'm being overly naive, but to me Facebook's woes are a side-effect, not the primary aim. Apple's change is to improve privacy for their paying customers, and if Facebook (or anyone else) relies on invading that privacy to make money ... tough. The window has closed. Time to figure out an alternative.
  • nikanj 5y ago
    Fortunately the other major smartphone provider is much more ad-friendly
    • theshrike79 5y ago
      It's as if The Other Provider is an ad company themselves =)
• pfortuny 5y ago
  As it is said here frequently, if your revenue depends essentially on a single actor (as is the case), your business is doomed by definition. Cf: all those people who depend on a google project to survive. This is the same, but at scale.
• ben_w 5y ago
  > But the fact that a company can do this to another company at the flick of a switch by changing the rules of the game on a whim is still kind of scary, even if I think it's for the better in this instance. As a general principle I agree, but this is more a reason to encourage many small businesses over a small number of trillion dollar businesses (other reasons exist for the exact opposite). But in this specific case, not only do I agree with you that it’s for the better, but I also can’t see how Apple is even going further than just requiring apps on its platform to adhere to GDPR.
• rbanffy 5y ago
  > a company can do this to another company at the flick of a switch I briefly started a service. It was an automated tool to track how your tweets affected followers and traffic to one or more sites. It was neat. Then Twitter changed the auth API. A month later, the throttles changed. Then something else changed in the JSON objects the API returned. We decided to give up when Twitter announced their own analytics tool, after about two months or part-time work. So yes, companies can and do that routinely. Sometimes, as it seems to be the case here, they are just acting in their (and their customers) best interest and completely ignoring the effects on other companies.
• JustMarco 5y ago
  Apple is asking users if they want any specific app to be able to track them. Users can still say it’s ok to track me, Apple just gives me the option instead of being on by default. Apparently a lot of people are saying don’t track me? And that’s important, I should be given the choice in regards to privacy. Not saying Apple is a saint, however it’s not that Apple changed the rules they provide options that weren’t available before (and imho should have been available already for years).
  • disgruntledphd2 5y ago
    And the fact that this makes their own (mostly losing) app store search ads product lots of money is just a total coincidence. Like, I could accept these changes if they applied to Apple too, but they don't, so the privacy stuff is a smokescreen for moves designed to keep their services revenue growing, and their stock price heading up and to the right.
    • Elidrake24 5y ago
      They applied to Apple before they applied to third party apps: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202074 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202074
      • disgruntledphd2 5y ago
        And does a scary warning come up when you first open one of the Apple apps to disallow cross app tracking?
  • jatone 5y ago
    this feature alone would make me switch from android to an iphone if it wasn't for things like pine phone being on the market.
• mongol 5y ago
  I don't think it is scary. I think it is evidence that Facebook's revenue is built on ground they don't control. Google at least took step to have some control by creating Android. Given Facebook's bottom line, they could have done something similar.
  • lotsofpulp 5y ago
    As could Microsoft. None of the other players wanted to risk as much as Apple by investing in hardware and in person services. Really investing in it, for 10+ years. They certainly had/have the cash.
  • MarkSweep 5y ago
    I suspect one motivation for this “Metaverse” thing is to create a platform that they control. Where they can track people as much as they want and show as many ads as they want.
• KoftaBob 5y ago
  > But the fact that a company can do this to another company at the flick of a switch In this instance, the flick of the switch added a prompt asking users whether they want to opt in/consent to Facebook tracking their activities on other apps. If Facebook is truly taking that much of a hit from that, it tells you how many users opted out. If their advertising model only succeeds by tracking users without their explicit consent, then their model is a failure.
• kergonath 5y ago
  > But the fact that a company can do this to another company at the flick of a switch by changing the rules of the game on a whim is still kind of scary, even if I think it's for the better in this instance. They did not flick the switch, the users did. They merely pointed out the existence of the switch.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• dotancohen 5y ago
  > But the fact that a company can do this to another company at the flick of a switch by changing the rules of the game on a whim is still kind of scary You should read about what Ford Motor Company did to the horse and buggy industry. Or what email (arguably Hotmail) did to the postal and phone companies. Or what Boeing did to the transoceanic shipping companies.
• BLKNSLVR 5y ago
  > But the fact that a company can do this to another company at the flick of a switch by changing the rules of the game on a whim is still kind of scary, even if I think it's for the better in this instance. You've got it back to front. If one company is $10b dependent upon another company not having the option to disable privacy invasion, then that company has chosen to build their castle in a swamp. It deserves to sink by $10b.
• grishka 5y ago
  It tells quite a lot about Facebook's business model when you realize it's threatened this much by user consent. Apple has simply stated asking for consent for something that didn't require it before. It's merely people's choice to not be tracked.
• ubermonkey 5y ago
  I think that's overstating the issue here. Facebook built their empire on browsers being super super permissive about tracking. Critically, this tracking was (a) something most users weren't aware was happening and (b) something that was very very possible to curtail, because it wasn't something Facebook controlled. People started noticing, and they didn't like it. Browser makers and platform makers moved to make these unhappy people happier. Facebook got caught out, because their whole business is built on this invasive tracking. I am 100% untroubled by the way this is playing out. It's not a general case problem. It's very specific to Facebook's dependence on an accidental aspect of the web that, when explained, most people are horrified by -- and that was fairly easy to rework.